GRAIL NASATweetup // September 7, 2011 // Kennedy Space Center, FL

7 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. – Registration at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex (@ExploreSpaceKSC )

9 a.m. – Welcome by Trent Perrotto (@NASA ) & Veronica McGregor (@NASAJPL ) in the Debus Center (entry at 8:30 a.m.)

9:05 a.m. – Meet the tweeps

9:50 a.m. to 1 p.m. – Tour of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (@NASAKennedy ) and Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, including stops at the Vehicle Assembly Building and Press Site launch countdown clock, Launch Complex 17 and #GRAIL, and Launch Complex 41 from which Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity (@MarsCuriosity ) will launch

1 to 3 p.m. – Break/Lunch on your own at Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex

3 p.m. – Jim Adams (@NASAJim ), deputy director, Planetary Division, Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, introduces Administrator Charles Bolden

(NASA Television begins http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nasa-tweetup)

3:20 p.m. –MoonKAM (@GRAIL_MoonKAM ) presentation from the Sally Ride Science (@SallyRideSci ) team

3:40 p.m. – Sami Asmar, GRAIL deputy project scientist, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

4 p.m. – Maria Zuber, GRAIL principal investigator, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

4:20 p.m. – Break

4:30 p.m. – Eyes on the Solar System (@NASA_Eyes) demo with Doug Ellison (@Doug_Ellison ), JPL Visualization Producer

5 p.m. – Vern Thorp, manager, NASA Programs, ULA (@ULAlaunch )

5:15 p.m. – Stu Spath, chief spacecraft engineer, Lockheed Martin (@LockheedMartin )

5:30 p.m. – Neil deGrasse Tyson (@NeilTyson ), Frederick P. Rose director at the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History (@AMNH )

6 p.m. – Group photo in the rocket garden

Check out this session (with Dennis Litky) for some ultra creative ideas for high school and college curriculum. Be prepared to think (way) outside the box.

First found at Eilidh.

You don’t even need to be a West Wing fan to love this. The Peters Projection perfectly presented.

Last weekend, we were at Bald Head Island, NC and spent some time on the beach. I enjoy walking on the beach and looking for interesting shells, etc. Something unusual caught my attention this time. A moist, brown/grey lump, roughly oval, covered with sand.

I kept walking. Then I saw another, and another. Most people ignored them, or thought they were probably some kind of animal feces. I’m just too curious, and besides, I didn’t think it was fecal material (there were no flies). So, I picked one up. It had more weight to it than I thought by just looking at it. I broke it apart and saw uniform texture and what appeared to be clay inside the sandy coating. I started to gather these “clay” blobs… much to some other visitors’ stupefaction.

Later I was able to confirm with the Bald Head Island Conservancy that what I had found was indeed clay. Jeff Harms, the Environmental Educator, told me:

What you are finding are indeed balls of clay from the salt marsh. If you were to slog around in the present marsh you would be up to your knees in a thick layer of rich mud. Over time this mud turns into peat and clay. What’s interesting about the clay that you are finding on the beach is that it is not from the present salt marsh but rather from about 40,000 years ago when the salt marsh stood where the present beach is. Barrier islands are basically islands of sand that continuously move and shift over time. Now the island has moved enough that the old clay layer that is beneath the entire island is starting to erode by wave action offshore and wash up on our beaches. That is also why you find so many oyster shells on the beach. Oysters also grow on the marsh side (not on the ocean side) and now as the beach erodes the entire beach is covered with oyster shells from the old salt marsh. Anyway, I hope that answers your question. The shell debris and sand that you find on the outside of the clay attaches as the clay balls roll in, anything you find trapped inside would be much older.

Pretty cool, I thought. But what’s my point here? Well, whenever I have read about clay in scripture, I always thought of something pretty basic and elementary. The building blocks. I never thought about the clay as the result of tremendous amounts of time and transformation. Even for the clay to be unearthed takes an enormous amount of upheaval and energy. I guess if I’m being likened to a lump of clay fashioned by a potter, I’ve been in process a lot longer than I realized!

Current Assignment: Thursday, September 24 (where is the month of September disappearing to!!??)
Read: Contracrostipunctus and Chapter IV: Consistency, Completeness, and Geometry
Listen: Contrapunctus 19 from the Art of Fugue (BWV 1050). This performance abruptly ends in the same place that the score ended due to Bach’s death. Bach left his name in the music, as the German notes B-A-C-H, a few measures before the end.

Summary of Contrastipunctus
This dialogue is central to the book because it contains a set of paraphrases of Gödel’s self-referential construction and of his Incompleteness Theorem. One of the paraphrases of the Theorem says, “For each record player there is a record which cannot play.” The Dialogue’s title is a cross between the word “acrostic” and the word “contrapunctus,” a Latin word which Bach used to denote the many fugues and canons making up his Art of the Fugue. Some explicit references to the Art of the Fugue are made. The Dialogue itself conceals some acrostic tricks.

Discussion Ideas

1. (for the Dialogue) GEB pp. 81 – For instance, Lewis Carroll often hid words and names in the first letters (or characters) of the successive lines in poems he wrote. Poems which conceal messages that way are called “acrostics”. Might this quote apply to this dialogue?
2. Why does DRH keep apologizing about his use of the term “isomorphism”?
3. What’s the problem with interpreting mathematical objects? In the case of the modified pq-system? In the case of Euclidean geometry? What’s wrong with our interpretation of a “straight line”?

(that’s enough to get you started)

Up Next: For Monday, September 28
Read: Little Harmonic Labyrinth and Chapter V: Recursive Structures and Processes
Listen: The Little Harmonic Labyrinth turns out not to be by Bach at all! It was written instead by his much lesser-known contemporary, Johann David Heinichen. Disappointingly, it doesn’t even have a fake resolution near the end, as the dialogue implies. Also, it’s boring. A completely unrelated piece, however, does have a clear “pushing and popping” structure to it, and a fake resolution: Waltz #2 by Billy Joel. Yes, that Billy Joel, retired from pop and writing classical music. Allow Achilles and the Tortoise one more anachronism and pretend this is what they’re listening to.

After thinking through various possibilities (face-to-face bookclub, social networks, listserv, etc), here’s my proposal:

1. Use my blog as the meeting place and record of conversation for the MIT course: SP.258 / ESG.SP258 Gödel, Escher, Bach


The Penrose triangle, also known as the tribar, is an impossible object. It appears to be a solid triangle made of three straight beams of square cross-section which meet at right angles. It is featured prominently in the works of artist M.C. Escher, whose earlier depictions of impossible objects partly inspired it. (Image by MIT OCW.)

2. Here’s the course description:
   

   How are math, art, music, and language intertwined? How does intelligent behavior arise from its component parts? Can computers think? Can brains compute? Douglas Hofstadter probes very cleverly at these questions and more in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Gödel, Escher, Bach”. In this seminar, we will read and discuss the book in depth, taking the time to solve its puzzles, appreciate the Bach pieces that inspired its dialogues, and discover its hidden tricks along the way.

3. In the bricks-and-mortar version of the course, they met twice a week for an hour. In our virtual version, we’ll discuss two sections in a week starting after Labor Day. We’ll follow this reading/listening schedule which follows the same order of the original MIT course. I’ll create a post for each of the reading and listening assignments (one on Mondays and the second on Thursdays). You can join in the discussion at any time during that week but make sure you have done the reading/listening first! It will be most productive if we move through the material together as much as possible. I reserve the option to close comments after a week, so that we keep moving forward and focus on the discussion for the most current reading/listening. However, if you get behind, you should feel free to jump back in later in the semester.
4. There will be an optional chat discussion once a week. We’ll figure out the format (iChat, AIM, Google chat, etc) and the day and time once I know who is interested.

Who’s interested?

UPDATE: There is now a page (see tab in the blue bar above) for the “Gödel, Escher, Bach” Course Schedule. This page has the reading and listening schedule and links to MP3 files for the music referenced. The dates listed are for when the discussion on the reading/listening will commence (so be prepared ahead of time). If you cannot keep up with the full schedule, you are welcome to participate in whatever chapters you are able to prepare for.

Another resource: MIT’s Highlights for High School recorded six lectures from a summer course (2007): Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey. A good overview of the main concepts in the book. You need RealPlayer to view the one-hour lectures.

This is not a concert or professional presentation. It’s the body of Christ encouraging one another with their gifts.

For the full story, read Jerry’s blog post.

Many of you already know about it, but I’m posting the link here for my friends and readers who might think that biblical studies scholars are always stuck in a book in a library and do not have a sense of humor. Nothing could be further from the truth, as this month’s Carnival demonstrates. And hopefully, you will also enjoy reading the posts that the Carnival highlights.

For example, here’s a lecture illustration I use. Which brain would you rather have?

But even with all that language study, there are days when you need some supplemental grey matter exercise. So, here’s a suggestion. This is a nice little surface maze (a sample from Dover Publications’ The Ultimate Maze Book by Galen Wadzinskiby) for your brain to tackle when you need to take a break from research, reading, writing, or whatever.

Dover Publications has lots of books with puzzles, mazes, and more to keep your brain cells active. I still have lots of stuff I want to coax out of my brain, so I’m going to do everything I can to keep exercising my brain cells.